And count slowly

People enjoy griping about the way people drive in their city, and here I go. Saskatoon has its share of problems but unlike any city I’ve seen before. Unlike Calgary, my chief annoyance with Saskatoon drivers is that they drive too slowly. The unposted and average speed limit of Saskatoon is 40 km/h. I don’t advocate speeding, but there should be a collective effort to get from A to B. Driving should be like dropping onto a stream, flowing towards your destination and dropping out at the right eddy. In Saskatoon it’s like trudging through waist deep water. I’ve never seen a more complacent populace of motorists. There is a customary delay of 1 Mississippi... 2 Mississippi... 3 Mississippi... 4 Mississippi... 5 Mississippi... before releasing the brake when the light turns green. And proof positive of this custom is that people consistently drive through aging yellow lights with the surety of a cannon-baller who knows there’s water in the pool. Then there’s the four-way face ballet. That’s when four drivers are at a four-way stop and are all looking at each other trying to decide, with a series of subtle eyebrow raises, which one of them should proceed next.

Travelling through this culture of the driving dead is not without its advantages. Like the last remaining able-bodied punk in a town overrun by zombies, I move briskly through the motorcoma. It’s not uncommon to see five cars lined up in one lane and the lane next to it empty at a red light. The driver of the fifth car must know that they’ll be waiting 25 mississippi’s before carefully inching forward. Of course, they’re not worried, they’ll just roll through when it’s yellow. And I’ve mastered the eyebrow twitch that entitles me first passage at the four-way stop.

I think I enjoy driving in Europe the most. There seems to be an understanding there. There’s a flow. You must take your opportunities when they come or they’ll be taken from you. And, as mother fearlessly demonstrated, following the rules over there is purely optional and you can drive wherever you want. One way street? I don’t think so. Tram tracks? No problem! Pulling into traffic and hitting the brakes? Mastered. License? Pff. And with a forward-shooting water canon on the front of her car she never had to master the eyebrow twitch.

Release the hounds!

Since the first time the corporate computer network was connected to the information superhighway, curious and internet savvy employees have been surreptitiously reaching out beyond the company firewall to interact with the world. Early on in this era, their browsing was quite innocent, exploring what the cyber world had to offer, perhaps since there was no internet at home. This of course ate up company time causing a cascade of reduced productivity and eventually a drop in net capital gain. Since no company wants to pay an employee for two weeks for what could be done in one week, managers had IT implement countermeasures such as restricting internet access to its employees to certain times and certain work-based sites. This meant those employees had to find other methods of getting what they needed from the net, which meant IT had to find other ways of implementing restrictions, ad vitam aut culpum.

Much like the race between virus programmers and antivirus programmers who exchange leading each other by a nose, there is a race at the office between Instant Messenger users and Information Technology departments. It is a race between good and evil. On one side you have people for honest and unrestricted communication at the office (PHUC OFF) who enjoy chatting with loved ones and long distance family members while their workload permits. On the other side you have Big Brother whose primary task is to remove all elements of potential distraction so as to allow the employee’s focus to be but on his task. These elements include but are not limited to sunlight, oxygen, peripheral vision, hair space, humour, opinion, blinking slowly, foot tapping, coffee refilling, window out-looking, face scratching and confirming dinner plans. A babysat worker is a productive worker! People are now free to delete the ubiquitous resume line “Able to work proficiently without supervision”, be it spurious or not. It's no longer applicable.

Over my years, many a trusty chat client has fallen at the end of a hoplITe spear. MSN, Trillian, Skype, Gaim, Meebo and Jabber to name a few. They each seem to last a few months before they are spotted by sentries and the hounds are loosed. I am currently winning this race thanks to a neat, little web-based messaging service called RadiusIM. So with my alert sounds turned down to a two foot audible radius I can chat away again to my heart’s content work permitting. At least for now the sun is shining and I'm tapping my feet. We’ll see how long this one lasts before Big Brother slaps my hand and takes the toy from this baby again.